


Your Love (Déjà Vu)

by olivieblake



Category: Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Genre: F/M, Max POV, part prequel part sequel, troubled marriages and other things that end in gunshot wounds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:53:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29863227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/olivieblake/pseuds/olivieblake
Summary: This was never a love story.
Relationships: Maxim de Winter/Narrator (Rebecca), Maxim de Winter/Rebecca de Winter
Comments: 14
Kudos: 27





	Your Love (Déjà Vu)

Fuck love. This was never a love story.

* * *

She’s there again when he opens his eyes. She’s smoking again, too, which is an infernal habit that infects the tips of her fingers and the smell of his sheets. His new wife doesn’t smoke, wouldn’t dream of it. Unladylike at best, destructive at worst.

“Want a drag?” she asks, holding it out for him. “You always liked them after sex as I recall.”

He finds that his left arm has gone numb and abruptly, he can no longer stand it. He shifts away, inch by inch, withdrawing so slowly from the body of his young wife that she hardly even sighs from their detachment.

“It’s not like we were, is it?” is the cool observation from the chair beside the bed. “With her, I mean.” She’s opened a window and it’s freezing in here. If not for the numbness, the tingling in his arm, he might have slept on peacefully. If not for the open window and the dead dragoness beside the bed.

“Of course it’s not like we were.” His legs feel restless now and he sits upright. Outside, the sky is still inky with night and he ponders something fracturing; the crash of waves, the break of dawn. His violence of feeling.

“Bored, Max?” she says.

She always knew how to rile him up. Said it was fun because he was never really riled until he was, and then he would only try to frighten her, poor thing. Thought he was such a threat but he wasn’t, not really. 

Poor thing. Only she could coax out the real monster and it wasn’t even really him. It was something that lived inside of him, dormant until her. After her.

“You’re dead,” he says. “You can no longer hurt us.”

She rises to her feet, flicking ash onto the pile of his wife’s discarded silken nightclothes. He wonders if the tracks of her immorality will still be there in the morning or if they, like Rebecca herself, will vanish in the night. 

“Oh, Max,” she says tenderly, stroking away the bead of sweat beside his temples. “I will always know how to hurt you.”

Her kiss feels real, like always. She bites him and laughs at the corrosive taste of iron in his mouth. He wrestles with her, with himself. He thrashes in the bed, waking to find his wife standing over him. “There, there,” she says. She touches his chest and he feels it, ghosts of last night’s pleasure.

“Were you smoking?” his wife asks quizzically, lifting what remains of her brassiere. 

The fabric is charred through, the window still open, ashes gently smoldering beside the bed.

* * *

The first time he saw Rebecca was spring and the blossoms that year were relentless. There was very little time between their meeting and their marriage; certainly not enough to count for much. At first glance he knew only that she liked the blooms, drew them upwards, sank in with her nose. He thought it was tenderness until he realized it was greed. 

Why _did_ she spare so much benevolence for Manderley? She had such a way with the gardens, the house itself, so that when she was gone the whole thing mourned her. Not with gloom, which would have at least produced some radiance come summer. No, instead the air was dry and parched and the grounds were sickly, missing their mistress’s chemical tears. 

“It’s so beautiful here,” says his wife, who knows nothing. Nothing of blooms or bloodied crescents in his back. How colorless her world, pastel and pristine. He envies her and the simplicity of her construction. He has no wish to harm her and this is different, this is ideal, this is love after all. The charmed life of simple affection.

Surely no man has ever suffered too exquisitely from that.

* * *

Rebecca was innocent at first, young and sweet or maybe only pretending, but it was a lovely charade. She kept it up for years, two or three—or possibly it just took that long for her desires to corrupt themselves, to warp and calcify until he caught her with her skirts around her hips, panting but expressionless. Her eyes met his from the doorway and she smiled at him, at the way he didn’t burst in or scream or leave. She smiled at him and skated her teeth along the groom’s exposed neck and he—he, poor thing, abandoned husband, forsaken lover, enraptured voyeur—moaned like there was nothing and no one between them. She smiled, his stomach roiled, she sighed and gasped and swayed and later he tried to corner her, to force her into confession, but she would not be cowed. She pulled him into her bedroom and told him not to be jealous, it was so boring to watch him be jealous. So what should he be instead, then? Vile, she said with her hands on his balls.

If it had ever been pretense, it was a good one. When had she begun to suspect him of his?

* * *

He’d been living with the specter of her for a year before she convinced him to leave Manderley. “I know you love it Max but come on, even I know this is pathetic,” she said. “What a sad reason to throw everything away. A house, Max! Honestly.”

She was bleeding erotically, dripping carnality onto his sheets. 

“It’s not just the house,” he said. It was his name, de Winter. The history in the walls, the sanctity of his blood. It was his responsibility to be haunted, beset by a litany of ghosts, festooned with the misery and the gravity of his forebears. Houses were empty things.

“It is now,” she replied.

* * *

“I hated her,” he says aloud.

He hated her with his fingers twisted in her hair. Hated her on the priceless table beside the overturned bowls of cold soup. Hated her in the divinity of her bedroom where he was not allowed unless he begged her on his knees. Hated her in his ash-soft sheets. Hated her on the fertile grounds of his sanguinary house. Hated her with his hair dripping down the back of his neck from the sudden, sodden rain. 

What had been so wrong with sweetness? With duty, with refinement, with the way he had been taught to love? He would have given her that eternally, the cold stiffness that defined his parents, his grandparents, his class. We could live separate lives, he suggested once. You can have your lovers, just leave me Manderley, leave me my legacy, leave me with my sanity intact. In response she had parted his legs and sat herself between them.

“You know, Max,” she said directly to his erection, “there is something dark in you, and only I will ever accept it.”

“No,” he said, but she was already probing around with her fingers, the ones that made his fertile earth bloom beneath her touch. He tried to shy away but knew by then he would only open up for her, keening and pleading until she smiled that beastly smile at him again.

“I don’t do this for everyone,” she said. He didn’t answer. He thought he knew better than to believe her. This was one of many things he told himself. She was a liar, that was easy to trust. It was easier to believe in her evil than to explain what had become of himself.

“Shh,” she murmured when he tried, fruitlessly, to argue, to tell her he’d had enough. The secrets the lies the games, he wouldn’t have it, didn’t want it. She would be mistress of Manderley and that was all. That was all, yes, that was enough, that was everything, that was the only thing. That was it, that right there, just like that Rebecca, my god Rebecca don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.

By the time she slid her fingers away he was sticky with exhaustion. She gave him a piteous look: poor thing.

“God wouldn’t put an orgasm button there if it wasn’t meant to be pressed,” she told him, and they never spoke of it again.

* * *

When he sees his wife in that wretched costume, the one Rebecca once wore, he wants to be sick. He unfurls with an old fury, a floret of profligate rage.

This is an old anger. A burst of tired rot. The obscenity of its return, and his relief, is staggering. Only one woman has ever made him feel this way.

“Did you do this?” he asks her.

She looks at him sideways.

“Do what?” she says with a shrug. “I’m dead.”

* * *

She used to give him books with certain words underlined. Secret codes that all spelled out variants of cock. You’re going to beg for me tonight. Sin with me darling. Max you little beast. She got most of her pleasure from torment. So, it seemed, did he.

“I hated her,” he says to himself, and it’s true, he did. There were volatile extremes but all of them measurable degrees of loathing. What did she do to make people adore her so? Was she telling them his secrets? He fantasized about her betraying him over cream tea, dainty porcelain in her treacherous hands, would you believe it if I told you Max has quite the insatiable appetite? He has a temper too, you know. He beats me, she’d say, gleefully sipping her cup. All I do is slave away to his putrescence.

When she came home from her various social outings he would hate her on the surface of her vanity, perfumes and oils shattering worthlessly to the ground. Or he would face her out the window and take her hair in his hands, yank it like ropes, like reins, while she would laugh.

“Harder, Max, harder!” she would say, laughing up at him, and the barbarity of it would flame up in his chest. How sickening he was. How sick. Afterwards he would be tender and she would be mewling in his arms, soothed as a kitten, and he would wonder how real it even was. He did these things to punish her, no, to punish himself, no, the gratification was not punishment for either of them. But it was destroying him all the same. 

With his wife he forces himself to face her. Her nose screws up when she’s in pain and he stops and slows because she has never wronged him. She is sugar-spun and tame.

“You’re bored,” Rebecca comments, and he ignores her. She wanders around the edge of the bed, watching him bite back his grunts. “You can’t tell me you enjoy it this way, Max, can you? My god, she looks so hopeful.” She stares at his wife, a tiny furrow between her brows. “She hardly even cares how badly you want her knuckles shoved up your arse.”

“Stop,” he grits through his teeth.

“Darling?” asks his wife, worried now, which is so much worse.

“Don’t do that.” He closes his eyes. Don’t do that, Rebecca will see, Rebecca will laugh.

Sure enough, she’s radiant with mirth. “Oh, Max, I hadn’t realized things would be so bad for you, poor thing. You poor dear.” She climbs onto the bed and braces her legs on either side of his. His eyes are still closed but he can feel her, smell the ash from her cigarette, incendiary as gunpowder. “Do you miss it?” she says in his ear. “The way I used to fuck you.”

He moans. He never liked her language. So foul. His hatred erupts and spills over.

“Oh, my love,” says his wife sympathetically.

He opens his eyes and Rebecca is gone.

* * *

Rebecca is over. Rebecca is gone.

He breathes the salty sea air of Manderley and exhales the dense smog of London. He did not tell his wife he was leaving. Imagine if he had done that with Rebecca? He would come home to an orgy on the library floor. She would see him and smile, sorry Max, I assumed you wouldn’t mind. Hungry? 

But he does not need to do these things with his wife. Those old games, they’re not for her. She is loyal, she is devoted, she is the vacancy into which Rebecca disappears. What a pretty little fool she is. He wonders if he is setting traps for her. Disobey me. Dare me. Defile me. But she doesn’t have it in her, destruction isn’t in her bones the way it was in Rebecca’s. When he gets angry with her she grows softer and more vulnerable, and so he would only be a monster, a monster like Rebecca, not to force himself to walk away.

“Bored, Max?” Rebecca says in his ear.

Rebecca is over. Rebecca is gone.

* * *

Until she isn’t. Her body resurfaces from the sea and he is nearly blissful with relief. The danger is back and he is effervescent with it, shining with it. Slick with fear.

“I hated her,” he tells his wife. He spills Rebecca’s secrets like a coward, playing traitor to everything they were. He waits for her to materialize somewhere in the shadows, to rise up from her knees to reveal that poor thing, he thought this was his confession but she’s been pleasuring his wife this whole time. He waits, but for every moment she does not appear his words grow bitterer. They sour in his desperate, fertile mouth.

He tells his wife every truth but the one of his pleasure. How ill he is! A murderer in the end. He killed her, he pulled the trigger. “I knew I could count on you,” Rebecca had said. “You poor thing, you idiot. When I say jump, you always jump.” But that isn’t what happened, not really, because she said jump and he shot her instead, and yet she still seemed unsurprised. He shot her and she smiled at him. He half expected her to rise from the dead and shove her hand down his trousers. He thought she’d be alive for him again someday, and in the wake of reality his mind breaks.

“I hated her,” he tells his wife and he means it. And yet, and yet, and yet.

She believes him. So now he knows she is a fool.

* * *

“Oh Max, you little idiot,” Rebecca says. She’s in his lap during the trial and he’s astonished nobody’s thought to ask questions. “I’ll admit I was never averse to the idea of you winding up in prison. That pretty face,” she says, stroking his cheek. “Think of all the people who’d love to make you suffer.”

He shivers and across the room, his wife’s doe-eyes find his.

“I always knew you were the only person I could trust to really hurt me,” Rebecca continues. “Everyone else was so very typical with their devotion. So dull. So boring.” She shifts in his lap and stares at the court documents, the images of her own swollen, mangled body. “I’ll admit, I loved myself too much to dirty my own hands.”

“So you used mine,” he says under his breath. Across the room his wife’s brow twitches.

“I’ve always used your hands, Max. Why not? I worked so hard to train them.” Rebecca hums something and leans to rest her cheek against him. “You were to me what she is to you,” she murmurs in reference to his wife. 

“Loved?” he breathes.

“Predictable.” She twists around to face him. “Let’s get out of here, Max,” she pouts, mercurial as the waves. “They’re going to let you go and it’s going to be so disappointing.”

* * *

When he first saw the body he thought of course she’s back, she’s won and I’ve lost, but since then he’s changed his mind. He doesn’t believe anymore that she ever wanted him to hang. That would be too quick an end.

“I could haunt you in a cell,” she says, half-hearted.

No, she wouldn’t.

“No, I wouldn’t, but only because I like you wealthy. I like you handsome and ruined and mine. You want to feel powerful? Make a rich man beg, darling.” She strokes a nail along his jaw. “You ought to try it sometime. Much more effective than making a little girl suck you off.”

He looks away from his young wife. “She’s not a little girl.”

“No, you’re right, she’s a little fool. Even better.” Rebecca laughs. “My god. What I could make her do in the span of a single night.”

“You’re dead now,” he reminds her. “Truly dead. You were always dying.”

“We’re all dying, Max,” she says simply. “Her too, just so you know.”

* * *

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” says his wife, apropos of nothing.

The house is ashes now thanks to Danvers. Bitter old Danvers, who longed for any truth—however false—to keep Rebecca beastly and alive. That his wife ever feared Danvers of all people was the most damning thing about her innocence, in retrospect. What a devoted old bat Danvers was in the end, stiff and unbending in everything from loyalty to arson. He himself feels nothing but relief to discover he overlooked her, another subject of Rebecca’s haunting. He still smells the smoke from time to time.

Imagine fearing Danvers. That would be like fearing him. It’s all so pointless. His little rabbit of a wife. So nervous and undecorated. Her neck is so long and delicate and sometimes when he blinks he imagines little jewels around it. Amethysts and garnets, ornate trappings of a bruise.

He will buy her something, probably today. Rebecca comes to him less often these days, and when she does he is more aware that he is dreaming. She feels distant, somehow. Bored.

“What’s left of you to interest me?” she reminds him. “Not guilty, they said. Well. So much for hanging around.” 

It’s unusually childish of her to sulk. “You wouldn’t leave me.”

“Max, I was never here,” she says irritably. “Never yours. Not really. Isn’t that why you killed me?”

“No,” he says. “You were always mine.”

It’s the worst accusation he can make and still she doesn’t flinch.

“Leave me alone, Max,” she says wearily, but he can’t. Whenever she’s gone it is only him and his wife. Only him and his wife, and whatever part of him that Rebecca unearthed, which he has ultimately failed to bury.

* * *

“In my view, she’s a fool just like you say she is. Does she think true love will protect her? You were the kind of man who’d kill his wife before I came along,” Rebecca points out. “Is that any less true now that I’m gone?”

“You’re not gone,” he says.

“Keep telling yourself that,” she tells him snidely, and he hates her so much it feels like hunger pangs.

* * *

His temper flares from time to time. They have no home and traveling is its own monotony. He misses the rotten blooms of Manderley. Misses the fertile grounds and sodden rains. Misses a time more than a place, misses a ghost more than a person. He’ll never want to cause his wife pain the way he used to crave Rebecca’s suffering—in terms of saturation he wants reds, not blues—but he doesn’t need to tell her that.

“I’m just saying,” Rebecca sighs, “if she doesn’t figure you out fast, she’s even worse off than me. Look how silly she looks, playing dress-up. Playing pretend with another woman’s husband. It’s pathetic. Don’t you think it’s pathetic? Don’t you hate it even a little?”

“You fucked plenty of other women’s husbands,” he says.

“Sure, Max,” she says dismissively. “But they never fucked _me_. And anyway,” she adds. “That’s not an answer.”

( _Poor thing_.)

* * *

“Someday she’ll be old,” Rebecca says. “And you’ll be older. And then even she won’t be able to make you feel young again, fresh again. She won’t always be able to wipe clean your sins, and then what, Max? What then?”

“You don’t control me,” he says.

The wound in her chest buds again, crimson efflorescence. 

“You pulled the trigger,” she reminds him. “Not me.”

* * *

He pulled the trigger. He starts to fantasize about the feeling. No, not the feeling. The sentence. The truth of it. The syncopation of the words, the meaning of the sounds, the texture of the pattern. He pulled the trigger. _He_ pulled the trigger. It’s like a locomotive chugging along. He murmurs for Rebecca to stop repeating it in his ear, he’s tired, he’s trying to fuck his wife and he’s tired of doing it, everything feels loaded and mechanical, chug-chug-chugging along while he fuck-fuck-fucks her. His wife says darling are you feeling alright and he mutters tell Rebecca that I pulled the trigger and his wife says Maxim and he says again, tell her, tell her I don’t give a fuck if God put the button there, she may have pushed it but I pulled the trigger and that’s what counts. She’s the poor thing, not me. His wife says Maxim are you feeling feverish and he says, deliriously, yes. 

He takes to his bed and Rebecca sits with him. “I hated you too, you know,” she says, exhaling while the ash scatters over his pillow case. “You were the worst part of me.”

The window is open again. The sky smells like petrichor, rotten blooms. Déjà vu.

“I’m not going to kill my wife just to keep you entertained,” he says to her, finally voicing it aloud, and when he says it, he’s almost sure he means it. He thinks there, it’s settled, it’s done, he can put the gun down now. Only he looks up and it’s not Rebecca smoking.

It was never Rebecca who used to smoke. It’s him.

* * *

Fuck love. This was never a love story. When he wakes up he is in a hotel in Monte Carlo and there is a pretty young girl in the lobby who catches his eye.

 _Meet me for tennis this afternoon_ , he writes her.

Then he reaches for his lighter and he laughs.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what this is so I'm posting it before I have to ask myself any questions!! Title comes from the song of the same name by Glass Animals.


End file.
